How AI Is Changing Cyber Threats—and Cybersecurity—for SMBs

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have long been at a disadvantage on cybersecurity. State-of-the-art cybersecurity and resilience programs have historically been expensive and pursued only

The cybersecurity outlook for small and medium-sized businesses can seem dire. Cybercriminal and nation-state cyberattacks appear to be on the rise, especially against utilities and small businesses. At the same time, there are new AI-enabled cyber risks, including AI agents from frontier labs breaching confinement and attacking other companies. Generative AI and machine-learning models have also streamlined traditional attack vectors. Phishing lures are now hyper-personalized, vulnerability discovery is exponentially faster, and ransomware operations are automated and ubiquitous.